This is totally alien to the spirit of Tahrir

Women hoping to extend their rights in post-revolutionary Egypt were faced with a harsh reality Tuesday when a mob of angry men beat and sexually assaulted marchers calling for political and social equality, witnesses said.

…

The demonstration on International Women’s Day drew a crowd only in the hundreds to Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the popular revolt that drove President Hosni Mubarak from power. Gone, organizers said, was the spirit of equality and cooperation between the sexes that marked most of the historic mass gatherings in the square.

As upwards of 300 marchers assembled late Tuesday afternoon, men began taunting them, insisting that a woman could never be president and objecting to women’s demands to have a role in drafting a new constitution, witnesses said.

That’s no good.

“People were saying that women were dividing the revolution and should be happy with the rights they have,” said Ebony Coletu, 36, an American who teaches at American University in Cairo and attended the march, as she put it, “in solidarity.”

The men – their number estimated to be at least double that of the women’s – broke through a human chain that other men had formed to protect the marchers. Women said they attempted to stand their ground – until the physical aggression began.

“I was grabbed in the crotch area at least six times. I was grabbed in the breasts; my throat was grabbed,” Coletu said…Egyptian women say that sexual harassment has long been rampant here and that they grow up expecting to be fondled in public by men with impunity.

That’s no good that’s no good that’s no good.

The “revolution” is worthless if that’s the kind of world it settles for. It’s worthless if it’s content with treating half of its people (or any of them, but especially half of them) as objects of contempt.

32 Responses to “This is totally alien to the spirit of Tahrir”

The revolutionary who demands that you accept your lot is, well – not much of a revolutionary. Still, I don’t think anyone imagined all the protestors would be down with equal (or, well, closely aligned) rights. They’re united in their hatred of the tyrant at the top but there are doubtless little tyrannies in homes across the nation. We’ll just have to hope there’s plenty who’ll oppose them all.

This behaviour by Egyptian men does not surprise me, even though we have to take the testimony of the reporter. I wonder what kind of consumption of porn fills the minds of Muslims in the Arab world and beyond, but I bet you it’s an obsession among many. Oppressive and authoritarian cultures create a population of emotionally inadequate people, who have little self-control over their basic desires. Look at the level of porn consumption within conservative states, for example, to see how suppression creates an immature level of self-control.

Women in the Arab world are treated like an underclass, something which is completely unacceptable, and yet we (in the west) always overlook this as a cultural or religious thing and therefore beyond political criticism. Many feminists (but not all) are simply silent when it comes to Muslim women.

It is this inequality between the sexes that creates this superiority/inferiority complex among Muslim men, which is simply dangerous.

These religious soaked cultures are simply unacceptable, and yet we are told to tolerate them in the name of diversity and multiculturalism. Perhaps there is a problem with our culture too, which continues to turn a blind eye, fails to notice women, fails to bring this to the attention of the masses.

There is no excuse for sexually assaulting someone for disagreeing with you or your ideals. That these ‘counter’ protesters would engage in such a thing makes it clear how little they think about women.

Why did anyone in the West expect that the removal of Mubarak would lead to a democratic revolution in Egypt? There are many surveys of Egyptian social attitudes that show that Islam is the dominant ideology, so the most likely outcome is a theocracy. The notion that the people of the ME are ‘yearning to be free’ seems remarkably naive to me, I’d bet most have absolutely no interest in, or knowledge of, liberal democracy.

@Egbert,

Yes,I agree, particularly in regard to the general silence of Western feminists and the misuse of multiculturalism which is used as a cover to reproduce predatory misogynist Islamic culture in the West. There is also the sense of superiority that many Moslems have over non-Moslems and the resulting delusion that we have nothing to teach them.

Multiculturalist propagandists have successfully conflated ‘religion’ and ‘race’, perhaps that has slenced the feminists, which doesn’t say much for their ethical standards, does it? Islam is, perhaps, just too hard a nut to crack.

Yes yes yes all very predictable and unsurprising, but at the same time, events like this can change people. They can and they do, but not always enough (of course).

One way of looking at it is that a society in which half the people are treated with contempt is a nasty ugly hostile society. The “revolution” created a feeling of euphoria. That could have meant that most people didn’t want to go back to a nasty ugly hostile society. Maybe it did, but if so apparently the minority is still pretty big (if this incident is at all representative).

The notion that the people of the ME are ‘yearning to be free’ seems remarkably naive to me, I’d bet most have absolutely no interest in, or knowledge of, liberal democracy.

I think people around the world, including the Middle East, do have a strong interest in democracy (although perhaps not of the “liberal” variety). They just have no concept of the importance of protecting the rights of minorities. But democracy is utterly worthless without such protection. I think this is a major failing of the “let’s export democracy” sloganeering in the United States.

People also generally don’t have much interest in a society where nobody is oppressed. They hate being oppressed themselves, but if you take away their “right” to oppress others, they view that as a form of oppression.

Perhaps, but Islam is patently worse in this regard. And unlike Christianity and Judaism, mainstream Islam remains anchored in fundamentalism. Add an especially misogynist Middle-Eastern culture and the mixture is toxic to women.

I’ve seen photos of Cairo street life in the 1930s and there are plenty of women but nary a hijab in sight. Hijabs — or simply absence of women entirely — would dominate the same streets today. Very sad.

Hey! B&W loaded in a few seconds for the first time in days. Usually it has been taking two or three minutes!

Anyway, as others have said, the news from Egypt is not surprising, though it is bad news. But what did we really expect to come out of the biggest Arab nation in the world?

Islam is incorrigibly misogynistic. That’s not to say that Christianity and Judaism have been innocent in this respect, and women were seriously disadvantaged in both Christianity and Judaism, but, despite claims to the contrary, it is not obvious that Islam can ever change in this respect. It’s not just that most Muslims are fundamentalist. There is no option. Its one of the fundamental principles of the religion that the Qu’ran contains the very words of god in god’s language. How do you fight that?

The only option is to force Islam to change, and before long someone’s going to have to do it. That’s why Ayan Hirsi Ali is trying to get Christians to do mission amongst Muslims.

As for Cairo in the 1930s I cannot speak with any first hand knowledge, but I still remember much of India in the 1950s, and black bags were in evidence everywhere. My brother and I, rather wickedly, when we were kids, used to unsettle them by following them through the narrow streets, and are probably lucky we didn’t get our fingers burnt. But “full purdah” was very common amongst the Muslims where we lived. I don’t know how people stand living that way. My guess is that they’re not really given a choice. What can I say? Religion is a poison.

I think morality, the kind of morality we seem share, an intellectual liberal type of morality which seems to side with the victim or against all kinds of injustices, requires development. It requires a cultivated type of culture with an emphasis on law, on rational debate, on human dignity and perhaps a mainstream storytelling/entertainment/art industry with this morality embedded within it. In other words, a civilised society raises an understanding of morality and justice to its citizens. This level of maturity is still relatively recent even in our western societies.

This is missing in the Arab world, with the exception of a minority of the educated and wealthy middle classes. Although young Arab middle class males may have gained a taste of the rewards within western cultures, they still require the experience, wisdom and maturity of an intellectually sophisticated class for a fully developed moral society.

Of course, all this is only attainable when the state is not oppressive against it’s own citizens. And so when the political class no longer oppresses society, then the intellectuals (whether male, female, Muslim or Secularist) must be free to voice their wisdom and experience to the masses, raising their conscious. If the intellectuals are suppressed and silenced by theocratic mullahs, then society has no chance of maturing into a progressive liberal free society. That is why Islamist societies are always destined to fail, so long as the power of the theocrats dominates intellectual life.

“That way” of life is divinely ordained, and cruelly sanctioned, that’s why they can ‘stand’ it. How can people, particularly women, escape from it, except in the most minor way? A family member, who lived in Israel in the 90s noticed that many Moslem women wore high heels under their enveloping burqas,rather sad really.

[T]he intellectuals (whether male, female, Muslim or Secularist) must be free to voice their wisdom and experience to the masses, raising their conscious. If the intellectuals are suppressed and silenced by theocratic mullahs, then society has no chance of maturing into a progressive liberal free society. That is why Islamist societies are always destined to fail, so long as the power of the theocrats dominates intellectual life.

There are obviously Egyptians with a western education (who probably came to adopt more liberal values), but if secular they would seem to be doubly penalized in the battle for public opinion. An argument for equality puts up little resistance to the emotive arguments from religion or hatred of the west. Does the same relationship between education and religion hold in Muslim societies as it does in western industrialized nations (limiting consideration to individuals not educated in Europe or the US)? In other words, does a nonwestern education engender the same “emphasis on law, on rational debate, [and] on human dignity?” In a more religious society the intellectuals can often also be the religious leaders. A mullah is educated after all, by definition.

This is not to say that your point about theocracy is wrong, but I question whether even if surmounted there wouldn’t be another barrier that’s just as significant. I think individuals are needed who can argue for the societal change from within. I’ve not come across many examples, but I don’t know if it’s truly unusual or I’ve just not been exposed to them.

People also generally don’t have much interest in a society where nobody is oppressed. They hate being oppressed themselves, but if you take away their “right” to oppress others, they view that as a form of oppression.

All too often true, and class oppression is probably about the most subtle there is.

These same abusing males were presumably only too happy to have the womens’ support when there was the mutual enemy of Mubarak.

As some media commentators have already noted, the ME revolution has many similarities to Europe’s 1848. As happened there after 1848, there could be a reaction that leads to the rise of a new crop of ME dictators. But the illusion that everyone is happy with things as they are has been shattered. The next stage according to the European precedent is universal manhood suffrage; democracy, but for men only. However, the salient fact is that democracy is nowhere found in the Arab world, and in the Muslim world only in the bastardised Iranian form and the Indonesian: which is probably the most advanced Muslim democracy of all. But at the same time it is fragile, and ever-subject to the threat of military coup.

Islam is inherently antidemocratic. So something’s got to give, sooner or later.

Mubarak, Gaddafi or Ben Ali aren’t especially devout Muslims and any democratically elected leaders are likely to be much more religious. For a political movement with a hope to get into power in those countries it makes sense to use religion as a way of uniting people. Also, the hatred of the west with it’s decadent culture, indecency and high divorce rates is connected to the rampant misogyny endorsed by Islam.

So, even a working democracy doesn’t guarantee women any more freedom and certainly not equal rights. The US is a modern western democracy with an educated electorate and women still have to fight to have the right to choose. And a lot of people are willing to vote for candidates who intend to take that right away from women.

I’m not surprised by this attack and I’m not optimistic. I hope I’m wrong, and that there’s a chance in Egypt (and Libya and Tunisia) for a Turkish style secular democracy that’s religiously moderate.

I’ll say it; I think Mubarak, bad as he was in many ways, was better than anything we can hope for in the way of Egyptian democracy. He’s actually been a MODERATING force against the nutcases, just as Saudi Arabia’s godawful royal family is still less reactionary and screwed up than the clan leaders and religious establishement that they keep somewhat in line; remember, the King actually wanted to let women start driving and the Saudi PEOPLE rose up in anger at the idea. Or like the Shah, who was horrible but Khomeini made him look like the good ol’ days. Or like the Chinese government, which has its issues but is far preferable to just getting out the vote to the average ultra-nationalist, super-conformist Chinese citizen who will, incidentally, have 12 daughters in order that his 13th will be a boy if you let him. The same way I don’t want assholes in the American heartland voting me into second class citizenship in the name of “democracy”, I wouldn’t want to see a bunch of new theocracies and pits of instability because of the same. There are certain social prerequisites for democracy and much of the world simply isn’t ready. It is ahistorical to expect democracy to emerge overnight. It’s not popular or PC to saay so, but there it is.

After having spent weeks warning people not to expect too much from this revolution, now I have to defend it.

The revolution is not worthless. Egypt has made lots of progress, and now is only 100 or 200 years behind the times rather than 500.

Give the Muslims a break; it’s only been 1200 years since the death of their prophet. It took Christians 1800 years after Jesus to give up chattel slavery. Women’s rights are quite recent here in the West; I was in high school when Swiss women were still not allowed to vote.

I could not support revolutions (which are by their nature violent and get people killed) if in the end, no permanent change for the better is achieved. Egypt may very well have progressed, but is it permanent? Why are they still protesting every Friday? Most of us here want these people to live in freedom and out of poverty, but we all understand that is not possible when Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, interfere in politics and push to get Shariah law as state law.

Swiss women were not allowed to vote before 1971, but Swiss men were. Switzerland has long democratic traditions with direct referendums as a central feature. So Switzerland, a wealthy developed country with a functional democracy and an informed populace, had not given women the vote because the Swiss men time and time again voted agaist it. In 1959 67% of Swiss voters voted no to women’s right to vote, and in 1971 still 34% voted no with seven cantons with no-majority. http://history-switzerland.geschichte-schweiz.ch/chronology-womens-right-vote-switzerland.html

If it’s so hard to fight for women rights when men are making the decisions even in a wealthy western country, how do you think it’s going to in countries where half of the women are illiterate and the majority adheres to a religious ideology based on misogyny?

I assume the middle-classes (a minority) in Egypt had a fairly western type of education, as the country is so heavily invested with American money. Its pseudo-secular status may have helped with liberal attitudes. I think Iran, before the revolution may have had a wealthy middle-class that created the revolution in the first place, which went horribly wrong once the Mullahs took power for themselves.

Clearly, education is essential for both liberal values and a stable middle-class to flourish. But it’s a sham middle-class if they’re not really contributing any wealth or intellectual culture to society, which seems the case in Egypt.

Why do you assume that Islamic societies will follow the same development path as Christian societies. There’s no reason to assume that the time elapsed since the death of Mohammed or Jesus has any significance whatsoever. Moslem nations have been remarkably static for the last 1000 years and would probably have remained so for the next 1000 without Western intervention.

I can’t think of any Western culture, apart from Classical Greece, where women have been so excluded , as in modern Moslem societies.

Not too difficult from that sweet elderly, black couple, who thought it was just fine to discriminate against Teh Gheys. (I shall refrain from expressing my disgust in vile words, until I’ve had a chance to read all the angry responses to me on Pharyngula.)